The difficulty of always finding the ideal person when wanted has led to the employment of men of good address who have had little or no training on freight trains; so that we find some conductors who are able to deal with all sorts of passengers with a good degree of success, but who are far from brilliant as managers of trains, technically speaking; while others, who from their early experience have first-class executive ability, are slow in discarding the somewhat rough habits of the freight train. While there are not wanting those who strive faithfully to reach the ideal, and succeed admirably, it may be said that the average conductor retains more of the severe than of the gentle side of his character, at least so far as outward behavior goes. The rigid requirements of his financial superiors, which compel him to actually fight for his rights with dishonest and stingy passengers, make it almost impossible that he should be otherwise. Ignorant foreigners, poor women and girls who have lost their way, and other unfortunates are, however, encountered often enough to preclude the conductor's forgetting how to be compassionate.
The heroic element is not wholly lacking in the conductor's life. The temporary guardianship of several hundred people is an important trust even in smooth sailing, but the conductor's possibilities are entirely different from the engineer's. He has so much to do to attend to the petty wants of passengers that their remoter but more important interests are not given much thought. The anxieties of a hundred nervous passengers who terribly dread the loss of an hour by a missed connection are much more likely to weigh down a conductor's mind than any thoughts of his duty to them in a possible emergency that will happen only once in five years. And yet the last-mentioned contingency is a real one. Only last year, in the great Eastern blizzard, conductors risked their lives in protecting their passengers. One spent three or four hours in travelling a mile and a half to a telegraph-office; in consequence of the six feet of snow, the blinding storm, and the darkness, he had to constantly hug a barbed-wire fence to avoid losing his way, and was on the point of exhaustion when he reached the station.
The term "station-agent" means, practically, the person in charge of a small or medium-sized station. When one of these men is promoted to the charge of a large city station, either freight or passenger, he becomes really a local superintendent, his duties then consisting very largely in the supervision of an army of clerks and laborers who must, each in his place, be as capable as the agent himself. The agent at a small station has a great multiplicity of duties to perform. He must sell tickets, be a good book-keeper, and a faithful switch-tender. He generally must be a telegraph-operator and must be vigorous physically. He must be ready, like the conductor, to submit to some abuse from ill-bred customers, and should be the peer of the business men of his town. He often encounters almost as great a variety of knotty problems as the superintendent himself, though he has the advantage that he can generally turn them over to a superior if he feels unequal to them. The practical difficulties that most beset him are those incident to doing everything in a hurry. People who buy tickets wait until the train is about to start before presenting themselves at the office. Then the agent has a dozen other things to attend to, and must therefore detect counterfeit ten-dollar bills with the expertness of a Washington treasury-clerk. Just as a train reaches his station the train despatcher's click is heard on the wires, and he must drop everything and receive (for the conductor) a telegram in which an error of a single word would very likely involve the lives of passengers. At a very small station the checking of baggage devolves on the agent, his overburdened back being thus loaded with one more straw. He is in many cases agent for the express company, and so must count, seal, superscribe, and way-bill money packages and handle oyster-kegs and barrels of beer at a moment's notice. Women with wagon-loads of loose household effects to go by freight, and shippers of car-loads of cattle, for which a car must be specially fitted up, will appear just as the distracted station-man is receiving a telegram with one side of his brain and selling a ticket with the other. The household goods must be weighed and tagged, the sewing-machine tied up, and tables repaired; the cattle-shipper must be given a short lecture on the legal bearings of the bargain for transportation which he is about to make, and his demand that his live-stock shall be carried 500 miles more quickly than human animals are taken over the same road is to be gently repressed. It is not every day that a small station is enlivened by this sort of excitement, yet it is common, and is familiar to every station agent. The variety in the duties of this position is, however, a great advantage to the ambitious young man, because it serves to give him a good lift toward a valuable business education. He can learn about the methods and knacks and tricks of many different kinds of business, and can profit by the knowledge thus gained. Thomas J. Potter, the lately deceased vice-president of the Union Pacific Railway, whose memory it is proposed to perpetuate by a bronze statue, began his railroad career as agent at a small station in Iowa. Others of equal ability and perfection of character have risen from similar places and by the same means.
In the Waiting Room of a Country Station.
The agent at a small station catches his breath between trains. There is then generally ample time for calming the nerves and preparing for the next onslaught. If he is a telegraph-operator he can chat with the operators at other stations—a common resource if the wires are not occupied with more important affairs. In the class periodicals of operators and railroad men, reference to this phase of their life may be constantly seen, and incidents of even romantic interest are not infrequent. Many of the men at small stations are young and unmarried, while at places where the business has increased enough to warrant the employment of an assistant, a young woman to do the telegraphing is frequently the first helper engaged. With this combination it is unnecessary to tell what follows. If iron bars and stone walls are things which Cupid holds in contempt, an electric telegraph wire is the thing which makes him "snicker right out," if we may use the language of the circus ring. A distance of 100 miles, instead of being a barrier, is, under these circumstances, an advantage. There is, to be sure, a slight disadvantage in the fact that any tender communication confided to the wires will be liable to fall on the ears of unfeeling persons at intermediate offices, but the overcoming of this obstacle provides the agreeable incidental excitement which is always necessary in genuine love-making. Young persons (or old, either) can study each other's characters, in important phases at least, at a distance better than at short range. The telegraphic mode of sending communications discloses one's disposition far better than does handwriting. Working on the same wire with another for a few months enables one to form judgments of that other's generosity or narrowness, serenity or excitability, industry or laziness, refinement or boorishness, kindliness of heart or otherwise, which are quite sure to be correct judgments. Judgments ripen into attachments, and romances of the wire are common.
At the railroad station next larger in size, the work is more divided. One man sells tickets, another attends to the freight office, another to the baggage, and so on. The ticket-seller must make five-cent bargains with the same urbanity that is given to a $100 trade, and must be able to toss off the latter in two minutes if occasion requires, or to spend an hour in helping the passenger choose the best route among a score of possible ones. The fusillade of questions that must be met by the ticket-seller every time he opens his window is familiar to everyone who has ever watched a place of the kind for ten minutes. The inexperienced traveller wants to be fully posted as to the exact hour of departure of a tri-weekly stage with which he is to connect at a railroad station a thousand miles away, and the more intelligent ones demand an oral time-table covering the trains for the ensuing week on all railroads within a radius of 50 miles. Those who cannot read or understand the time-tables are too modest to ask aid, and their misfortune is disclosed only after their train has gone and they are found in tears; while those who can read the table ignore it and ask questions simply to be sociable.